I feel like I must have. One of my favorite blog subjects seems to be "movies that everyone likes except me." I have attempted to watch Blade Runner at least 3 maybe 4 times. I finally succeeded last night, only falling asleep in the last 8 minutes, in which (like so much of the movie), nothing happens. I watched the "Final Cut" version that director Ridley Scott endorses and over which had complete artistic control. Apparently the early DVD transfer was muddy--a serious problem in a movie that is rainy and dark for 2 solid hours--and this was fixed, and the sound was restored as well.

I get the artistic importance of this movie. I get that it was also a technical achievement. In fact, without the painfully dated Vangelis soundtrack it is amazingly ahead of its time. The art movie pacing is a serious problem; I'm surprised as many sci-fi fans worship this movie as they do. I realize that in previous attempts to watch it I had a really hard time figuring out which details were important and which were things that the camera just lingered on for no detectable reason. By now I know the backbone of the story, last night I didn't have to expend as much energy sifting plot points from atmosphere.

My current fear is that the fellow who is choosing the next zookeeper movie night is going to pick Blade Runner. He is on record as declaring it his favorite film, but is he the kind of person who will drag a whole room full of people through the soup of 2019 Los Angeles for two hours? We shall see. And I should talk: I made the same group of people watch my favorite movie, Repo Man.

Then tell me, please. I thought I'd watched it as a kid, and my recollection was much as you describe--dark and nothing happens. But then, studying sci-fi and trying to fill in major gaps in my exposure to it, I keep reading that Blade Runner was such a landmark movie about a cop (Harrison Ford?) chasing down an android. It sounds cool, but it also doesn't sound anything like the film I tried to watch.

Deckert (Harrison Ford) is reluctantly convinced (we don't see how) to do one last job: retire 4 replicants who have come back to earth to try to figure out how to live past their 4 year life span. Along the way he falls in love with a replicant who works for the company that builds them (and who is unaware that she is a replicant). With her help he manages to track down and kill 3 of them, almost getting killed himself. The last one (Rutger Hauer), having failed to find a way to prolong his life, saves Deckert's life before expiring. Then there's 10 minutes tacked on to the end where they hint that the replicant he is in love with might be dead but she turns out not to be dead. Edward James Olmos, the creepy cop who makes origami, has been there, and his words ring in Deckert's ears "everybody dies don'tcha know" or some crap. Also Deckert is also a replicant, but they never explain why you are supposed to know that but you should have read the book, shouldn't you have?

Actually, I watched it in the decade it was made and don't remember any of it except wasn't there an amazing bit of gymnastics at the beginning, by a female replicant with an amazing body (was it Daryl Hannah?) who eventually gets offed and we never see her again for the rest of the movie? Or was I just dreaming that part?